1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image display apparatus and method, a program, and a recording media, and, more particularly, to an image display apparatus and method, a program, and a recording media that are configured to realize high-speed image input switching as well as image displaying that minimizes the sense of visual discomfort.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, television receivers have seen great strides in functional diversification, performance, and device configurational sophistication. Generally, these television receivers executes image quality control by software because software makes it easy to execute modifications and cope with complex specifications. Image quality control is executed by changing the settings of a register holding parameters for specifying preset brightness, color shade, and so on. The register for general use in image quality control is set during a blanking interval that is provided along with input switching or channel switching.
Referring to FIG. 1, there is shown a flowchart describing a related-art image control processing example. In step S1, a television receiver determines whether an image switching command has been received and waits until the command is found received.
If image switching is found executed in step S1, then the procedure goes to step S2, in which the television receiver starts blanking. Consequently, the display screen of the television receiver goes blank (in which no image is displayed).
In step S3, the television receiver executes input switching. At this moment, the supply source of a signal corresponding to an image to be displayed on the screen is switched from the tuner to the video input terminal, for example.
In step S4, the television receiver sets a register in accordance with the switched image signal supply source.
In step S5, the television receiver ends blanking. Subsequently, for example, the image control corresponding to the register set in step S4 is executed on the image corresponding to the signal supplied from the video input terminal and a resultant image is displayed on the screen.
Thus, the image control is executed.
However, as the number of registers to be controlled by software increases, it takes long to execute such processing as arithmetic operation and setting. Therefore, if complicated software control is executed, it takes longer to complete register setting, resulting in a longer blanking period. Control operations for analyzing the contents of video (or image) and dynamically reflecting the results of the analysis to register setting require the capturing of the video for a certain period of time for the analysis. In this case, it is also necessary to capture video during a blanking period to execute the analysis, thereby extending the blanking period by a time in which the video is captured.
In order to overcome the above-mentioned problems, methods were proposed in which the quality of an image is adjusted after displaying the image. For example, refer to Japanese Patent Laid-open No. 2000-307896 (referred to as Patent Document 1) and Japanese Patent Laid-open No. 2000-78496 (referred to as Patent Document 2) for more information.